I was taking a little hiatus from blogging and didn't realize that my hosting company expected me to pay for their service...

I'll try to file more dispatches from the IT front, but in all honesty, we are sort of in a state of trench warfare in the battle against the curry-scented wage pirates. My own recent experiences as an IT contractor indicate that slumdog H-1Bs are fewer and farther between in corporate IT as the economy has picked up pace. Wages for guys like me are rising, and although they are not at dot-com era levels, they are up.

Clearly the IT companies that used to purge American techies to make way for bugger-farming chair-warmers from the land that time forgot have learned a lesson -- DON'T CONFUSE PRICE WITH VALUE. With the H-1B cap still in place and some high-profile lawsuits, companies are now forced to deal with the market forces of supply and demand. Now that I am on the market again, having escaped another Desi manager and his H-1B-turned GC-carrying tech lead at a place that shall remain nameless, I can attest to the relative shift in the demographics of the IT landscape. Of course, I still get the numerous calls from marble-mouthed retards like "Amit from Macrosoft" wanting to see if I am interested in a COBOL position in Des Moines, but even the calls from the Desi bodyshops seem to be less frequent, now coming in at 3 or 4 a day instead of 10 or 12. Case in point, Molina Healthcare, a notorious curry den here in SoCal that got caught purging whitey to make way for a pack of jackals from Cognizant, is now actively recruiting programmers to clean up the mess that the slumdogs left. A recruiter even referred to "that H-1B thing" at Molina in a recent phone call I had.

I always found it amazing that the biggest advocates for having unlimited H-1Bs pour into our country are usually the free-market plutocrats that opine at places like the Wall Street Journal. Speaking about the WSJ, I've heard from a few insurgents that there is reporter sniffing around and wanting to talk to the infamous Tunnel Rat. FYI, Tunnel Rat doesn't speak to journalists that work for an organ of the hi-tech regime that would like to see him making Mumbai-level rates coding complex software. There are almost 10 years of posts here to read, including a screenplay, so what more can I add for his below-the-fold Section B story? I bet he is expecting to hear some sob story about a middle-aged hack who didn't see the writing on the wall when his whole IT department started smelling like tandori chicken and everybody began communicating in broken English, and then found himself a victim of occupational apartheid, jobless and bitter, left to vent on his blog. That is what they always want, because that is all you read about when you see a story about the H-1Bs. The theme follows a pattern - poor, brilliant Kumar who can't get a green card or naive Ashish living in a guest house with 10 other slumdogs in Edison, or the 40-something techie out on his ass, going on his second year of non-work, bitching about how some douchebag named Amir flooded his old company with slumdogs.

You will never hear about the ex-Marine who got his Desi boss shit-canned for trying to game the recruiting process at a big-ass tech company so that he could flood his department with fellow upper-caste Indians, preferably from Gujarit. Yeah, that guy -- the one who can tell recruiters to literally fuck off when they send him a req. with a below-market rate and an invitation to meet with the hiring manager named Rajeet. No, that narrative doesn't play well with the subscribers to the WSJ, who bitch and moan about having to pay circa-1999 wages to developers with cutting edge skills and twenty years experience in IT -- THOSE FUCKERS WANT A 25-YEAR OLD SLUMDOG WITH THE SAME CV, AT HALF THE PRICE.

Disclaimer
The thoughts expressed on this blog may or may not be the author's own and are protected
by the 1st Amendment. Any attempt to reveal his identity by contacting a slumdog
hack at Google, or a corrupt Desi sys-admin at his ISP will be dealt with promptly
and severely. Civil and criminal penalties may apply if one is found to have used
private information in an attempt to get the author fired at the Hindu-only I.T.
ghetto he currently works at. In addition, any Desi who attempts to burn the author's
house down because they are enraged over his writing will be prosecuted to the fullest
extent of the law. This isn't India.